The process of globalization encompasses economic and financial integration. Abolition of capital controls and dismantling of barriers of different kinds are important ingredients of the process that will entirely change the exposure of previously sheltered companies to shocks on the global...

Central banks have been made more independent in many countries. A common rationale has been the existence of a credibility (or lack-of-trust) problem for monetary policy. This indicates a possible and until now unexplored link between social trust and central-bank independence. Our empirical...

We investigate whether temporal preferences expressed as a sum of discounted consumption utilities can be derived from a welfare representation in the form of a sum of discounted total utilities. We find that a consumption-based representation in the usual exponential form corresponds to...

Since July 2007 the world economy has experienced a severe financial crisis originating in the U.S. housing market. The crisis has subsequently spread to the financial sectors in European and Asian economies and led to a severe worldwide recession. The existing literature on financial crises...

The search for growth-promoting policies is found to demand knowledge of how growth depends upon actions of entrepreneurs and how these actions depend upon the prevailing institutions. While institutions have extensively been examined for their influences upon the freedoms and the incentives of...

The search for growth-promoting policies is found to demand knowledge of how growth depends upon actions of entrepreneurs and how these actions depend upon the prevailing institutions. While institutions have extensively been examined for their influences upon the freedoms and the incentives of...

Real exchange and interest rates may still fluctuate inside the EMU and give rise to changes in competitiveness. We find, in contrast to what is generally expected, no convergence in these variables after the introduction of the euro. On the contrary, a divergence is found that is extraordinary...

The major strand of finance literature understands market efficiency through the market’s ability to process information into prices. Another strand of literature refers to the economists’ usual sense of the word, i.e. that markets ensure that resources are allocated to their most profitable...

We analyze producer price developments in the transition from a national exchange rate regime to a monetary union. The focus is on the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). Stylized facts witness about an exploding gaps in producer-price inflation during the years immediately following the...

No abstract.